Sympathy
by benignmilitancy
Summary: Two sufferers cross paths.


_Sympathy_

* * *

A girl sits at the top of a staircase with her arms wrapped around her knees as she watches her house fall apart. She blinks back a cinder that brushes her cheek, ignoring the sting it raises in her skin. Fluttering embers and creaking rafters that wheeze out smoke all play part of a symphony for her. There is a comforting sort of cohesion here, even in the carpet that's grown stiff with singe and the grotesque flesh portraits crucified to the walls. Even when it grows hard to breathe, beauty resides in suffering.

Angela sits and waits for someone.

* * *

Daddy arrives with a whisper.

 _Be a good girl, Ange._

Telling her not to struggle. Telling her to go back to sleep, to be quiet. Daddy crawls up the burning steps stinking of lust and whiskey, and she's run out of places to hide.

 _"Crap!"_

Angela's squeezed eyes fly open as she hears gunshots ricochet off the walls. Through the swimming haze of the inferno, she peers down and there is a boy wielding a gun, yanking the trigger repeatedly and puncturing Daddy's flesh with each shot.

Daddy writhes and jerks, reaching out to her. Upon the last report, he gives a shuddering moan and slides limp down the steps, leaving behind a trail of blood on the carpet.

"Daddy!" she cries, covering her mouth. The boy's ice blue eyes snap upward.

"Jesus H., that thing's your _daddy?"_

Embers crackle.

Slowly her hands slide away from her mouth: " ... they all are."

"Yeah," says the boy. "Sure."

"Who— Who are you?"

The boy reels back. She doesn't fear that gun he clutches, nor the way its pealing smoke blends with the eternal churning here. "Why do you wanna know? So you can make fun of me, too?"

"No," she says. "Why would I?"

"Why _wouldn't_ you? You got eyes in your head? You think I'm a friggin' pig, don't you?"

She stands at the edge of the landing, her legs shaking even as they urge her to run. "You don't know the first thing about me or what I think," Angela replies, her throat hoarse with smoke. "And even if I did, I'd at least have the honesty to say it to your face."

The boy's lips pinch into a thin line, and swarthy patches flame red under his cheeks and neck, but he seems to understand. Regret sinks in almost immediately as she presses her hand to the peeling wallpaper, digging her stumpy nails into the warm drywall underneath. "Anyway … I—I'm sorry to have bothered you."

"Whatever." The boy kicks the flesh aside, spattering fresh blood onto his thick calf. "Look, I killed your stupid monster, all right? Now why don't you just tell me where the exit is so I can get the hell out of this dump? Pretty Boy's gonna come stomping around here soon, and I'm getting a migraine just listenin' to him—"

Angela furrows her brow. "You're talking about James?"

A facetious yellow-toothed smile diverts his irises. "Nahhh, the _Pope_." Then he snorts. "Pretty Boy's been laughin' at me behind my back ever since he got here, but he thinks his shit don't stink. Acts all holier-than-thou. Says he's out lookin' for someone."

"His wife," Angela says. The young woman smiling serenely in a torn photograph. The way James said her name as if she were Christ's mother herself, this Mary. She remembers.

"Yeah, a dead wife. He talks to thin air thinking it's her, too. Friggin' nutso."

With a pronounced scowl at the dead heap of flesh beside him, he gives Daddy's viscous body an extra kick for good measure. Grinding his heel leaves an imprint of his worn sneaker in the blood and mucus coating Daddy's ribs. He pants slightly from the exertion.

"He thinks he's so much better than the rest of us," the boy says. He sniffs sharply as he scrubs the perspiration from his brow with the back of his wrist. "But this town don't call just anyone, you know? Not the normal people, anyway. He's gonna get what's his sooner or later."

"You're hoping it's sooner."

"Heh. Now yer gettin' it, princess."

She digs her nails into the drywall until they become coated with streaks of chalk white. So Daddy wasn't the true target after all. But what does she expect? Men are all the same: cruel, ignorant, one-minded. If they're not hurting women, then they're turning their violence against each other, lashing and clawing until nothing remains. Perhaps it's best she's rid of them, at least until her mother arrives. It's so _hot_ here it blisters, and her body has begun to ache for that knife.

A burning rafter pokes a hole through the door at the bottom of the stairwell, eclipsing the outline of the bloated boy that bears so much of that malicious _stink_ just like her swine brother and father once had. Angela points at it.

"There's your exit," she says. "Don't come back."

Eddie slams the door behind him.


End file.
